Indon count will confirm Joko win: expert

An academic has predicted Joko Widodo will emerge the winner of Indonesia's presidential election.Source: AAP

A CANBERRA-BASED academic says unless there has been massive manipulation of the vote, Joko Widodo will win Indonesia's presidential election.

MR Joko's camp was the first to claim victory in the knife-edge poll last week, only to have rival Prabowo Subianto soon after make his own claim to the people's mandate.

As the world's third-largest democracy waits for the electoral commission's official count, due by next Tuesday, both sides claim to have found evidence of vote-rigging. The Australian National University's Dr Marcus Mietzner says "without any doubt" the count will confirm the "quick counts" - tallies made by reputable organisations on polling day. Those tallies gave the election to Mr Joko in the order of 53-47. Quick counts were devised so Indonesian voters didn't have to wait weeks to get a winner, and have proven accurate in elections since 2004.
Dr Mietzner says the science, also used in Germany, can't be wrong. "There's actually no way you can get it wrong," he told an audience in Jakarta on Tuesday. "If quick counts are done in the way they are supposed to be done there's no room for big variation." Indonesia is now focused on stopping manipulation of the count, with ordinary citizens volunteering to use social media to make the process transparent. Both sides claim to have found discrepancies. Team Jokowi's Budiman Sudjatmiko says they've reported differences between tallies at the polling stations and those at district levels. Meanwhile Mr Prabowo's spokesman, his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo, says their side has found 250,000 "fictitious names" voting for Jokowi in Jakarta alone. Experts are divided on whether stealing the election is possible. It would require more than five million votes to be moved. Kevin Evans, a veteran observer of Indonesian politics, says it's "not beyond the bounds of plausible" but is also "highly unlikely".

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